02/13/2012 [PF #198] Bit of a no-brainer

[joshofspam]

Hmmmm...a bit of a sad point for Keaton. Kind of like getting a sucker punch after throwing one of her own when you consider her remark about Johan Cross last page.

Interesting...with those round ears, was Keaton's brother's torturer a mouse cubi?

[Tapewolf]

Interesting...with those round ears, was Keaton's brother's torturer a mouse cubi?

Those are horns, actually.  I believe she's some kind of ewe.

[joshofspam]

Interesting...with those round ears, was Keaton's brother's torturer a mouse cubi?

Those are horns, actually.  I believe she's some kind of ewe.

Oh, well that's a relief really.

I was imagining it was Minni Mouse there for a few minutes. That was an awkward few minutes there.

[justacritic]

Interesting...with those round ears, was Keaton's brother's torturer a mouse cubi?

Those are horns, actually.  I believe she's some kind of ewe.

Oh, well that's a relief really.

I was imagining it was Minni Mouse there for a few minutes. That was an awkward few minutes there.

Speak! or I shall use... THE POLKA DOTS!

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I do have to wonder about the approach, though. If you kill your informant, you have no way of confirming that the spell he gave you actually works.

Or, if it actually works, you can't tell if it's the spell to open the city, or the spell to open his boxers drawer...


Very short-sighted on the part of the torturer, really. But hey...

[Gabi]

If the torturer can read thoughts, she can tell if he's concealing something.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

According to what we've heard from Ambaargh, Cubi _can_ read thoughts... but it's nasty and painful and extremely dangerous, even when used on Beings. what they usually listen to is emotions. And with Cubi, that's susceptible to "emotion jamming"...

As a result, I'd say there's a better than even chance of a Cubi under torture being able to resist as much as a human under torture; that is to say, not very much at all, but still a possibility.

Just my 2p, anyway.

[Tapewolf]

According to what we've heard from Ambaargh, Cubi _can_ read thoughts... but it's nasty and painful and extremely dangerous, even when used on Beings. what they usually listen to is emotions. And with Cubi, that's susceptible to "emotion jamming"...

I think you're thinking of mind-reading.  'Cubi can sense emotions and hear people's thoughts (e.g. tune into their inner monologue) with virtually no training (e.g. Dan has used thought-reading twice, and may also have tapped into people's visual centres when Aary was de-dressu'd).  Full-blown mind-reading is the dangerous one.

FWIW, they may even be bluffing, but would you take a chance on your soul like that?

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

I do believe you're right.

However... there are also the problems with that - take Jyrras "rubber bumper baby buggy" moment with Aaryanna. And your average Cubi is likely to have a number of different strategies for dealing with having their mind read. If it were me, I'd be putting up a shield, and then putting _fake_ thoughts in front of it, as a regular process. That way, if anyone reads the surface thoughts, they're going to pick up the usual drivel, but not what I'm actually thinking. And if I do it as a regular thing, I'll get _good_ at it, fast....


but that's just me.

[Tapewolf]

Still waiting for Ren to produce the inked version of the page, he was otherwise engaged most of yesterday.

In the meantime, this might be interesting to some people:
http://www.project-future.org/stuff/things/NoahPanelInk33.png

[Noone]

I was bored and so I went ahead and decoded the message. Here's what I got.

[spoiler]Near a tree up a river there's a hole in the ground...[/spoiler]

[VAE]

I was bored and so I went ahead and decoded the message. Here's what I got.

[spoiler]Near a tree up a river there's a hole in the ground...[/spoiler]

HEE!
One of my favourite songs.

[Tapewolf]

It was a tough call whether to keep it in plaintext or not.  I considered asking Ren to translate it into Russian, but that would have made it too hard...

[Sofox]

Hah, that's awesome. Didn't know you liked that song. I love it.

Kobra, I may be slow but how did you decode it? Is there a key somewhere?

[Tapewolf]

Kobra, I may be slow but how did you decode it? Is there a key somewhere?

The font is called 'Lovecraft's Diary' and it was also used in DMFA's Evil Beach Party.

[Noone]

Hah, that's awesome. Didn't know you liked that song. I love it.

Kobra, I may be slow but how did you decode it? Is there a key somewhere?

I used cryptanalysis.
The first thing I did, I assigned each of the characters to an arbitrary letter. Since there were repeat characters I figured that they would be english language words (rather than gobbleygook). I constructed myself a string that took note of the repeat characters. I couldn't apply numerical techniques, because for all intents and purposes, this had a special letter transmutation rather than a numerically based one, such as an affine cipher.

First, it was pretty obvious to figure out which one was 'a', since there's no other single letter that could realistically be used so often.

Next, I took a letter frequency analysis. You'll see that the 'e' character comes up often, so I plugged that in. There aren't -that- many four letter words that end in 'ee'. There's 'thee', but that didn't feel right given the setting. 'free' and 'flee' also came to mind, but in trying them things didn't make sense after I started 'solving' for the other letters. I eventually settled on 'tree'.

Beyond that, it was a matter of figuring out the remaining characters using knowledge of the english language, letter frequency analysis, and common sense. Once I had the baseline though it became a lot easier.

[Sofox]

Awesome cryptanalysis, especially with such a small text sample. I've always liked that area, espcially with reading Simon Singh's The Code Book